In Britain, the Terror Question Remains the Same: War or Crime?

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Tuesday, September 29, 2026

 

Earlier this month, when we marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities, my reminiscences as a former terrorism prosecutor focused on the even more dimly recalled eight years prior to the suicide hijackings. (See here and here, and this Free Beacon review of Second Wave, a book about al-Qaeda’s plots to hit the United States again shortly after 9/11.) To my mind, the most underappreciated counterterrorism innovation is the transformation from the Clinton-era law enforcement paradigm to the law-of-war footing adopted by the Bush-Cheney administration after nearly 3,000 Americans were killed and iconic American sites were demolished or badly damaged.

 

In fits and starts, out of frustrating recognition that the crime model was a security disaster while the war model invited overkill that stifled American liberties, we’ve finally arrived at an uneasy hybrid: (a) military and intelligence operations against jihadist groups overseas; (b) intelligence and treasury mapping and monitoring of jihadist groups as they move money, personnel, and assets across borders and continents; and (c) law enforcement prosecutions of terrorists caught plotting attacks and of their abettors providing material support. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a vast national defense improvement over how things stood on February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed — which I regard as the Sunni jihadists’ declaration of war against the United States. (Arguably, the Shiite jihadists had declared war in 1979, with the Iranian revolution followed by the siege of the U.S. embassy and Hezbollah’s attacks on U.S. installations and assassinations of American officials. But the WTC bombing was the global anti-American jihad’s proclamation that it could hit us in our homeland.)

 

The reports of a jihadist plot in Britain over the weekend, and particularly the frustration — including that expressed by President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — that the five suspects apprehended were promptly released, is a reminder that the “war or crime” dilemma confronts the United Kingdom, just as it confronts every Western nation targeted by Muslim terrorists.

 

British counterterrorism has traveled a path nearly opposite our own.

 

Let’s set the stage. Five men in their mid-20s were arrested in the wee hours of Sunday morning in a village near the Royal Air Force base in Fairford. All five are British nationals (which hardly precludes the possibility that they are Muslim terrorists connected to overseas jihadist networks). They were suspected of plotting to attack the base, which our NATO ally allows the U.S. armed forces to use, including in connection with the ongoing Iran war. By Monday, all five had been released on bail. CBS News (in the report linked above) says the U.K.’s counterterrorism police stress that the men are “subject to stringent conditions on their movement and contact with others,” and that they “absolutely remain under investigation as we explore multiple lines of enquiry.”

 

These assertions are consistent with Secretary Rubio’s insistence that Sunday’s incident was “very serious” and “clearly involved” a foreign power — which could be a country or a terrorist organization, and which the president suggested could be Iran.

 

Nevertheless, the rapid release without charges, along with reports that the police found no explosives or weapons, has led to speculation that the men were not engaged in a terrorist plot at all — were, perhaps, just looking to steal fuel. Some of that supposition seems daft to me. (If you wanted to steal fuel, would you really try to pull that off at or near a fully armed and operational military base?) Yet, the doubts about whether this was truly terrorist activity, notwithstanding the implication that it was from statements of top officials with better intelligence than the public has, is understandable. After all, Britain has a long history of detaining terrorist suspects.

 

Let’s turn to that history.

 

In the 20th century, the U.S. had comparatively little experience dealing with organized terrorist activity. And our 1970s experience — spawned by the radical left’s activism against the Vietnam War and what it regarded as systematic, incorrigible racism — resulted in spying scandals that pressured the government to fortify due process protections. By contrast, throughout the century, Britain dealt with a low-thrum but often brutal terrorist war against the Irish Republican Army — and, in the last decades of “The Troubles,” the Provisional IRA. There had thus been episodes of internment of IRA suspects, a process that was refined over time into a form of pre-charge detention (i.e., the suspect is held in anticipation of criminal charges).

 

By 2000, the Troubles had subsided, but the U.K., like most of the West, was awakening to the jihadist threat. British counterterrorism law was amended to reach foreign operatives more readily. And after 9/11, anti-terrorism legislation led to indefinite detention of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism (deportation having become more difficult because of court decisions).

 

To summarize, while America stood firmly on a law enforcement counterterrorism footing until 9/11 occurred, the Brits, because of their different history, had long before carved terrorism out of their criminal justice system and subjected suspected terrorists to forms of detention, monitoring, and interrogation that would have violated ordinary due process rules.

 

Here’s the interesting dichotomy: While we’ve incorporated law-of-war measures since 9/11 (the most extreme being the continued use of lethal force overseas and some remaining indefinite detention), British law has scaled back its wartime measures under political pressure from progressives, Europe, and a growing (and very politically active) Muslim population.

 

Indefinite detention was reduced, first to 28 days of pre-charge detention, and now to 14 days. And that is a ceiling — not close to automatic because it is supervised by the courts, which will free a suspect if the proof seems weak. Moreover, if a suspect is released from detention, it is difficult to re-detain unless the police can show newly discovered evidence of guilt. On the other hand, the police have discretion to impose significant monitoring conditions on suspects who are released on bail — and then, if the suspects transgress the stringent release conditions, they can be charged and potentially detained for bail violations.

 

Consequently, a quarter century after 9/11, British law more resembles pre-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism than it did during and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. I believe this is the reason the suspects have been released.

 

As a number of analysts have pointed out, this weekend’s arrests appear to have sprung from a reactive police investigation rather than an intelligence probe. That is, notwithstanding President Trump’s claims to the contrary, the Brits may not have been looking into these suspects for a long time; the five may instead have been grabbed because they were acting in a suspicious manner — it’s hard to tell because there are, for now, no formal allegations.

 

If that theory is right, then police are starting from scratch: They have some evidence of clandestine activity in a location that would be an attractive terrorist target, but they may (at least at the time of apprehending people) have had scant intelligence regarding their connections (if any) to foreign powers. Although investigators apparently believed that a bombing plot was afoot, current indications are that they did not seize explosives, bombing components, or other weapons.

 

Now, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bombing plot. Sunday could have been a dry run, or it could be that the five men arrested were supposed to meet up with other plotters who weren’t arrested and haven’t been identified — there are infinite possibilities. This much, however, seems clear: The investigation is in its early stages; what happened over the weekend was not the culmination of a counterterrorism probe in which, after days or weeks of observation, a bombing plot was thwarted.

 

From the perspective of the British police, the sensible course was to release the suspects on bail. It gives investigators the opportunity to monitor while exploring connections to other players and foreign powers. Simply stated, Britain is not on a war footing; it is in law enforcement mode. If police and prosecutors had pressed for detention without enough evidence to charge terrorism crimes, a judge would have set the suspects free, the government would have been humiliated, and the case would have been set back.

 

Of course, if the suspects are terrorists, then releasing them — even with monitoring — is a setback for British national security and, possibly, American military safety and effectiveness.

 

The longstanding quandary hasn’t changed. It can’t change. If a country sees itself as at war, national defense is the priority and suspected enemy operatives are detained even if the grounds for suspicion are sketchy or can’t be revealed in court for fear of exposing intelligence secrets and sources. If a country does not see itself at war, then terrorism is treated as a law enforcement issue, and due process for the suspects is prioritized over public safety.

 

That is frustrating, especially for Trump officials who seem to think — incorrectly — that they are empowered to “designate” suspected criminals as terrorists and then treat them as if they were alien enemy combatants with no due process rights. Yet it’s simply a fact that neither the British nor the American public feel sufficiently threatened at this moment to transition to a war footing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, or implying that I’d like to see it change — which would probably require a massive terrorist attack. Just that it’s a fact.

London Stops Being Ambiguous About Iran’s Involvement in the RAF Fairford Attack

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, October 01, 2026

 

With one possibly state-supported terrorist event dominating international headlines, we shouldn’t let the last possibly state-supported terrorist event slip into obscurity.

 

In the hours following the sprawling police operation that broke up a likely terrorist plot targeting RAF Fairford over the weekend, London devoted most of its energies to assuring the world that they had no concrete evidence linking Iran to the plotters. That ambiguity conflicted with what we were hearing from other Western officials.

 

At the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio claimed that the thwarted attack was the work of “a foreign actor,” and Donald Trump claimed that the suspects had been “under investigation.” Indeed, according to Benjamin Netanyahu, the plot should have been on Britain’s radar because Israeli intelligence had given the U.K. a heads-up. “We gave the Brits the intel that there was going to be an attack, and it’s an Iranian-sponsored attack, and pretty much the next day they slapped sanctions on us,” he complained.

 

Netanyahu’s consternation is warranted. The confusion that followed the plot’s breakup largely stems from how British officials handled it and how the public and the press interpreted their actions. According to the AP, for example, a court’s “decision to bail the suspects — and the fact that residents who were evacuated have started to return home — suggested that no viable explosives were found.”

 

The AP’s readers twisted that inference into an acknowledgment that nothing really happened here — nothing, at least, that rises to the level of an act of war against the United Kingdom by the Islamic Republic of Iran. At most, this might have been a botched plot by some amateurs, perhaps even “British nationalists.” More likely, it was rank criminality — perhaps mere fuel theft, as the suspects were found with unusual quantities of gasoline in their three vans.

 

In the hours since, however, Britain’s Labour government has been far less coy about the nature of this attempted attack.

 

“There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford,” Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC on Wednesday. “We will say more in due course, but we can confirm our belief that we believe Iran to have played a part.”

 

Even that statement was a little too weaselly for . . . the left-of-center Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman, Calum Miller. “If confirmed, the UK should expel all Iranian ‘diplomats’ who have assisted acts of terror on UK soil — up to and including the Iranian ambassador,” he said in a statement.

 

If the sentiments Miller expressed are indicative of the British left, it’s reasonable to expect that the British right — which has been cleaning up in local elections of late — is similarly incensed. That reaction should lead us to revisit the implication promulgated by New York Times reporter Michael Shear, who speculated that confirmed Iranian involvement in the attack would lead the British to turn against their own government for offending the Islamic Republic. Perhaps Britons do still retain the instinct toward self-preservation.

 

The investigation into the five British nationals arrested in connection with the plot continues, despite their release on bail. According to the The Times, police are still determining whether the group was engaged in surveillance, testing security in the area, conducting a “dry run,” or executing a mature plot. But establishing that the suspects were, knowingly or unwittingly, acting on behalf of a foreign actor can be difficult.

 

The one-time head of the U.K.’s National Counter Terrorism Security Office, Chris Phillips, explained how terror-sponsoring states recruit assets in the West:

 

“They go onto the dark web, and they post, ‘Would someone like to do a job and make 10,000 pounds?’, as an example,” he said.

 

The person who carries out the job is often “four or five rungs down the line”, with no direct link to Iran or Russia.

 

Sometimes, state terrorism sponsors will utilize existing criminal gangs, like Sweden’s Foxtrot network, to enlist mercenaries in their attacks on Western assets, Israeli diplomatic facilities, and sites where Jews gather.

 

That degree of separation provides Iran, Russia, or any other state sponsor of terrorism with a level of plausible deniability that, for some reason, satisfies far too many Western governments. But Burnham’s acknowledgment that Iran played a role in this plot has started a sequence of events that may take on a life of their own. Indeed, the implications should be clear.

 

The United Kingdom and the United States were targeted in a terrorist plot on British soil by entities in league with and likely directed by elements within the Islamic Republic of Iran. We shouldn’t have to dwell much on what that means or the consequences that, by rights, Iran’s actions should beget.

Is Iran’s War Coming to the West?

By Mike Nelson

Monday, September 28, 2026

 

Early Sunday morning, five men were arrested in England as they were preparing to attack RAF Fairford, a British military base that hosts several hundred U.S. military personnel and aircraft—notably some of the B-1 and B-52 bombers that have conducted strikes on Iran. The specifics of the planned attack are not yet known, in large part because the quick reaction of British counterterrorism police—who intercepted and arrested the men before they could carry out the attack—meant that the explosives-laden vans the men were driving never got to their intended destinations.

 

The public does not yet know the identities of the suspects, the content of any statements they’ve made to police, and what materials may have been recovered from the suspects’ vehicles and residences, but British police are said to be investigating Iranian involvement in the foiled attack. And we should not be surprised if the evidence, when it is available, does point toward Iran. As military and economic pressures increase on the Iranian regime, and as fewer options present themselves to attack U.S. forces in the Middle East, Iran is likely to expand the war—in terms of target types, geographic location, and means of attack. These kinds of external operations are also in keeping with Iran’s long history of gray-zone, asymmetric, and terror attacks against Iran’s adversaries all over the globe.

 

Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, Iran conducted assassinations throughout Europe, killing dozens of dissidents and opponents of the revolutionary regime across France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and Austria. In 1980, Iran even successfully assassinated a target within the United States, killing Iranian exile Ali Akbar Tabatabaei outside his home in Bethesda, Maryland. More recently, in 2011, Iran recruited conspirators and agents in the United States to conduct an attack targeting the then-Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Adel al-Jubeir. The plot involved attempts to recruit a member of a Mexican drug gang to place a bomb in a Washington, D.C., restaurant, which would be detonated when al-Jubeir dined there. The plot was ultimately foiled when the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration intercepted Iran’s efforts to recruit a Mexican gang member. Iran has also not given up on its desire to assassinate President Donald Trump and several other members of his first presidential administration for their roles in ordering the killing of Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard’s elite Quds Force.

 

The specifics of the attack on RAF Fairford are not yet known, meaning its intended purpose is unclear. This could have been a largely symbolic attack intended to further drive down popularity for an already unpopular war in advance of the U.S. midterm elections. It could have also been specifically targeted to destroy or degrade a critical portion of America’s integrated offensive capabilities. The act of dropping bombs on Iranian targets is the end result of an incredibly complex, global chain of military power that integrates not only the aircrews and airframes dropping the bombs, but everything from the intelligence analysts and collection assets that identify and develop the targets to the logisticians who move the fuel and ordnance required for the attacks and the cooks and medics who provide life support. Targeting any part of the vast, interconnected chain of capabilities could disrupt the U.S. military’s ability to meet our planned operational efforts. This attack could have been targeted toward the aircraft, fuel depots, ammunition storage facilities, or even aircrews themselves—all of which are essential to the American military’s capacity to project air power over Iran.

 

This attack also highlights another topic that has been front of mind in the war. If the attack had been successful, not only would it likely have destroyed American assets and taken American lives, but it likely would have killed British military personnel or civilians. Even with the attack intercepted, 85 British homes in the vicinity of the vehicles have been evacuated as a precaution. In other words, even if our allies do not decide to actively join the fight against Iran, Iran has shown that it is willing to target countries that merely host U.S. forces engaged in the conflict. Iran has displayed this inclination consistently throughout the conflict, launching attacks against Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. This attack would seem to be a continuation of that targeting methodology, wherein Iran views the locations from which U.S. forces launch as legitimate targets. In this light, it is understandable that Italy and Spain may have been reluctant to allow access, basing, and overflight authority for U.S. forces conducting offensive operations out of fear that doing so could have opened them to Iranian attacks.

 

The Trump administration has become mired in this conflict in part because of a lack of planning and clarity on both the things that we can control, such as our goals and reasoning for the conflict, and the things we cannot, such as the action of the enemy. But while Iranian responses may be outside American control, they should not be outside of American imagination, anticipation, and preparation. Iran’s disruption of maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz was fully predictable prior to a conflict, yet the president claims to have been taken off guard by the Iranian response. We may now be facing another round of Iranian escalation, the targets, means, and locations of which are less easy to anticipate and, therefore, require the vigilance and preparation the administration has been uninterested in providing to date.

 

The president and his administration must begin to communicate more earnestly and effectively about what is going on in the war against Iran, what the U.S. military is doing, and what we are hoping to achieve as the conflict stretches on. If Iran does conduct successful attacks against Americans outside the Middle East—be they kinetic or cyber, aimed at military targets or civilians—the administration will need to answer difficult questions about how such an attack could happen in a conflict in which the president has already declared victory dozens of times.

 

Regardless of the Trump administration’s statements otherwise, we are still very much at war—a war that has not been resolved through overwhelming military force or through diplomatic maneuvering. Until the conflict is resolved, Americans should not be surprised when Iran seeks to harm the U.S. and its interests. The administration was correct in characterizing the Iranian regime as an evil supporter of terrorism across the globe. It would do well to start believing its own perspective and preparing accordingly.

Britain’s Inertia Is a Warning to America

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 24, 2026

 

In recent years, I have been privy to the curious trend of Europeans who, having been assiduously fed all manner of nonsense about life in the United States, have come to understand that their presumptions were all wrong. In yesterday’s London Telegraph, Allister Heath describes this phenomenon rather well. Beneath the pull-no-punches headline, “I saw a breathtaking glimpse of what Britain could have become,” Heath offers a blunt challenge to the smug among his fellow countrymen:

 

If you want to comprehend the scale of Britain’s decline, our economic, geopolitical and technological humiliation, the magnitude of the self-sabotage inflicted upon our nation by our incompetent political class, head to one of America’s booming Republican-run Red States.

 

It will guarantee a shock to your system, and jolt you out of any residual complacency. It will simultaneously energise you and plunge you into depression. You will be blown away by the growth, the clatter of construction, the siege of cranes across the skyline, the massive cars, the energy, drive and ambition, the wealth, abundance and cheap energy, the entrepreneurial go-getting, the ostentatious celebration of success.

 

I was born in Britain, and I live in Florida (the state that Heath visited), so I have seen this from both sides. And I can tell you, unequivocally, that the author’s assessment is correct. The juxtaposition of the two places is increasingly stark, and yet, because distance serves as a shroud, this is obvious only to those of us who have visited both regularly over time. Most British people have not, and because of this, Heath concludes, it has become possible for them to lie “to [themselves] about the depth of the hole [they] have jumped into,” and to remain unaware that, irrespective of their healthy self-conception, they are actually “poor and increasingly backwards.”

 

I take no pleasure in confirming this. I am the only member of my family who emigrated to the United States, and while I am indeed an unreconstructed Americaphile, I bear no ill will toward my country of birth, nor toward my parents, my sister, or the rest of my kin that still lives there. It’s just that . . . well, Britain has got it wrong.

 

Heath contends that Britain never truly recovered from Covid, but I’d put the decline a little earlier: Britain, like the rest of Europe, never truly recovered from the 2008 financial crash. In that year, the economies of Europe and the economy of the United States were the same size. Now, the economy of the United States is about 150 percent the size of the economies of Europe. And why wouldn’t it be, given that the countries of Europe haven’t actually done anything useful. Britain is a welfare state. That’s what it exists to be. That is its purpose, its role, its ambition. Neither its bureaucrats nor its people care about growth, innovation, or success — except insofar as they can use those things to pay for more welfare. Its National Health Service — which is awful — is seen not as a system that exists to serve people but as a political end in its own right. (If the British government wants the public to do something, it insists that it is necessary to “save the NHS.”) Its unbelievably lavish social spending is, bizarrely, widely described as “austerity.” Its vaunted attacks on “inequality” have stagnated wages and made everyone poorer. Its refusal to use its energy reserves — or abandon its ridiculous “net zero” aims — has made the price of energy a permanent crisis. The whiny are lauded; the useless are celebrated; and the handful of aspirational figures who are left are regarded as too pushy, too aggressive, too American to be trusted. The result is that Britain has become drab, lazy, inert, and, worst of all, fatally complacent.

 

As an American, do you feel good reading Heath’s description of the United States? I do. I also feel alarmed. There’s nothing written in the stars that guarantees that our country must be this way. On the contrary: America’s position in the world is the product of choices it has made. America, The Telegraph notes, values “success.” If it ceases to, it will get less of it. Relative to Britain, America has low taxes and no VAT. If that changes, so will the dynamism of its economy. America has no single-payer health-care system to permanently corrupt its politics and devour the energy and treasure of the middle class. If it introduces one, it will decline inexorably. America has a constitutional order that features a strong separation of powers, encourages gridlock, and entrenches protections of individual rights. If it deconstructs that system, it will collapse into dysfunction, infighting, and mediocrity. Like Britain, America faces the demographic trend of an aging population relying on a relatively smaller share of workers for the payment of government benefits; but unlike Britain, it has not yet enshrined the “triple lock” guarantee that ineluctably increases pension payouts and makes other reform impossible. If it does, it will fatally harm the group that is pulling the wagon.

 

Allister Heath is depressed by contemplating what Britain “could have become.” He is right to be. Americans should thank him for the compliment and then turn to worrying about what America could become, too — if, but only if, it follows the same path.

How to Squander Good Will

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, September 18, 2026

 

One of the downsides of our celebrity-dominated culture is that our policy conversations often are so easily misdirected by spectacularly uninformed people such as rappers and the president of the United States of America.

 

Rational ignorance is a real thing, and most of us are entirely uninformed about most things. For example, I could not pick Macklemore out of a police lineup or tell you the name of a single one of his songs, but everybody has to have a Macklemore opinion this week after he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour following an outbreak of imbecilic “Free Palestine!” baloney.

 

I do not have any definite views about Macklemore, and, though I am not proud of the fact, my view of the Palestinian situation is barely more developed: Like a dead owl, I don’t give a hoot.

 

I know that’s awful. There are children and innocents caught up in that mess, and it is unfair to write them all off because of the brutality of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, etc. But—just between us—that is more or less what I do. I used to try to care about the legitimate grievances of the Palestinians, but I stopped after the Sbarro bombing, which many Americans have forgotten because it happened right before 9/11. It was a horrible scene. A soldier who witnessed the aftermath reported: “The worst thing I saw, which I think will haunt me all my life, is a baby that was sitting in a stroller outside a shop and was dead. After the explosion, the baby’s mother came out of the store and started screaming hysterically.” Other children were blown through windows by the force of the bomb.

 

No doubt the Palestinians had—and have—legitimate complaints. What they have forfeited is any real moral right to have anybody care very much about that fact. Leaders are, in theory, responsible for their people; at a certain point, peoples also are responsible for their leaders. The terrorist leadership of the Palestinian quasi-statelet has not been imposed on a resistant Palestinian population at the point of a bayonet. It is difficult to think of the Palestinian leadership as legitimate, but it is, horribly enough, evidently representative.

 

The attack on the children at the pizza shop in downtown Jerusalem was carried out by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and by Hamas, a terrorist organization that the Palestinians were content to make their government in Gaza. Hamas would later stage the spectacular atrocities of October 7, 2023, butchering, raping, kidnapping, and torturing innocent people, many of them women and children, whose crime was being the Jewish citizens of a Jewish community. If I had had any residual interest in the Palestinians’ complaints, it would have evaporated at that time, but it already was long gone. I still follow the news, and I hear and read a great deal of settler this, checkpoint that, Zionist blah blah blah, and I … just don’t care about the Palestinians. Maybe one of these days they will get their act together but, as far as I am concerned, they need to be a generation away from their last bombing of a pizza shop before I am much interested in their supposed national aspirations.

 

I have long felt much the same way about the Irish Republican Army and the Irish republican cause. I remember walking through Heathrow Airport in the 1990s and hearing a young American woman asking why there were no trash cans. “Because if we had bins, we would have bombs in our bins,” came the curt answer from her British interlocutor. Of course, the Irish have been put-upon since forever, but they entrusted their cause to a gang of bloodthirsty savages and ordinary criminals, and the murderous campaign of terror directed at the United Kingdom by Irish republicans is something that should neither be forgotten nor easily forgiven.

 

Yes, the Ulster unionists were an unlovely bunch, too, but there’s no both-sides-ing away, e.g., the Omagh bombing, the victims of which included a dozen teens and children, a pregnant mother and her unborn twins, and many more. You don’t get to do that and enjoy my sympathy, and no amount of romantic Celtic twilight horsepucky is going to change that. Arabs, Irish, whomever—at a certain point, it’s just got to be: Screw you and your cause. There’s an effectively limited supply of sympathetic attention in the world, and the Palestinians and the Irish republicans have overdrawn their accounts. Terrorists who intentionally murder and torture children go to the bottom of my give-a-damn list, as do the people associated with them. Unfair? Maybe. But you can’t bring home every stray geopolitical puppy.

 

But, you know: I’m not a rapper.

 

Donald Trump, who is the president of these United States of America and an utter moron, decided to weigh in, off-the-cuff, in favor of the IRA’s project—which is to say, he endorsed dismantling the United Kingdom, our nation’s most important ally. “May as well happen now,” he said of disuniting the United Kingdom, of which what we now call Northern Ireland has been a part for two and a quarter centuries. On the same trip, Trump announced the suspension of tariffs on Irish whiskey, and he did so for the same reason he proposed ripping apart the United Kingdom—because he is a g-ddamned idiot who needs to hear applause every four minutes or else he starts to forget that he exists.

 

Macklemore has opinions about the Palestinians. Trump has opinions about the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. As noted, I do not know much about Macklemore. But, of the two men, at least one is a confirmed moron—and it is the guy with nuclear weapons.

When Every Jew in the World Is a ‘Settler’

By Seth Mandel

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

Andy Burnham has decided to begin his term as prime minister by fundamentally reshaping Britain’s relationship with Israel. For the worse.

 

Burnham is trying to prevent any further exodus of anti-Zionist politicians from his ruling but floundering Labour Party. Keir Starmer, his predecessor, came into office on a massive electoral wave, which he promptly squandered. To get out of the hole Starmer left London in, Burnham has picked up a shovel and begun to dig: He is simply doubling down on Starmerism.

 

And the first order of business is to institute a boycott of Jewish towns and businesses in Judea and Samaria.

 

That’s going to cost Palestinians jobs, but the Gaza Left is unconcerned with actual living, breathing Palestinians. Burnham too, apparently.

 

Why is Burnham instituting discriminatory policies against Jews while making Palestinian lives harder? Because he has been convinced by the “settler violence” narrative.

 

Now, violence orchestrated by a few dozen extremist Jews has risen. But by the most recent annual statistics we have, that violence still does not reach the number of attacks originating in Judea and Samaria by Palestinians against Jews.

 

Still, violence moving in the wrong direction is a problem. And there are two ways that Israel’s allies have sought to address it. The first is the approach taken by President Trump. Along with Ambassador Mike Huckabee and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the administration’s team has real credibility with the Israeli prime minister and the segment of the Israeli population most affected by, and implicated in, disorder in Judea and Samaria.

 

The result: Recently Benjamin Netanyahu ordered the removal of several illegal settler outposts, and the IDF dismissed a soldier who prayed with settlers who besieged an Arab home, despite it being election season, a time when Benjamin Netanyahu is usually more hesitant to anger the right wing.

 

The Trump team won Israel’s trust and got some concessions.

 

The other strategy, the one pursued by Burnham, France, Canada, and other Western countries, was the opposite: reduce cooperation, reduce trust, and remove all possible diplomatic influence over the Israelis.

 

The results: Israel closed the British consulate in Jerusalem and removed Britons from West Bank Palestinian military training and from the Gaza postwar coordination team.

 

The removal of the consulate in Jerusalem is overdue. The UK uses it as a diplomatic post for Palestinians but keeps its Israeli embassy in Tel Aviv. The UK is now free to move its Palestinian consulate into the state of Palestine that it recognized.

 

The other result of all this will, of course, be increased anti-Semitism. If you want to understand why Jews are uncomfortable with the suddenly ubiquitous “settler violence” narrative, it’s not only because it paints all Jewish life beyond the armistice line as illegitimate. It’s also because of stories like the following, from the Times of Israel’s New York correspondent:

 

The flyers went up in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood last month, plastered onto lampposts, bollards, building walls and traffic control boxes.

 

“Beware: Talmudists are trained to cheat,” said one of the flyers posted in opposition to a housing redevelopment project.

 

“Locals vs. Rothschilds,” another said.

 

While those flyers echoed age-old antisemitic tropes, others deployed Israel-related or anti-Zionist rhetoric, decrying “dirty zionist money” and comparing the redevelopment project to the Nakba.

 

“Stop Zionist occupation of Manhattan. NYCHA residents must keep their homes,” one said, referring to the New York City Housing Authority, at the entrance to an apartment building.

 

Progressive DSA-types have been nurturing this particular globalization of Jewish evil for a few years, but it has really taken off now. In a June Democratic primary debate, Darializa Avila Chevalier specifically equated gentrification in New York with West Bank settlement and suggested the same “institutions” are responsible for both. It was an absolutely crazy thing to say, true bottom-of-the-barrel Jew-baiting. But Chevalier wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to say it.

 

A group called Crown Heights Bites Back is part of this activist campaign. Last year it put out a statement that said: “Black people in Brooklyn are violently exploited via rents to then feed their genocidal land grabs in Palestine.”

 

One of the major figures in New York’s anti-Semitic incitement industry is Nerdeen Kiswani, who, as the Times of Israel notes, accused “Zionist landlords” of “exploiting Black communities here and building settlements with it in Palestine.”

 

Do I even need to mention the popular “Israelis are colonizing the world” videos and the constant attacks on Israelis traveling abroad?

 

The point is that Jews understand that when the progressive political dogma holds that all Jewish Israelis are settlers, the lie soon gets applied to Jews anywhere at all. Andy Burnham is reacting to this ugly campaign by rewarding it, and thus feeding it. And he’ll continue to do it after seeing the consequences for Jews around the world.

Why Keir Starmer Should Never Run NATO

By John Gustavsson

Friday, September 04, 2026

 

On Monday, Keir Starmer announced his resignation as a member of British Parliament for the Holborn and St. Pancras constituency. In his statement, Starmer said he wished to “focus on other issues” including international affairs and defense. While he did not specifically name NATO, many believe Starmer wishes to succeed Mark Rutte as secretary-general when the role is up in 2028. If that’s indeed where his sights are set, America should not let that happen.

 

Why might Starmer think he has what it takes to be secretary-general? The truth is that for European politicians, NATO has become something of a retirement gig. Former secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg got the position after losing reelection in Norway, as did Mark Rutte after his last government imploded in the Netherlands. The same can be said for the EU: Ursula von der Leyen was a moderately successful politician back in Germany before she was elevated to the position as president of the European Commission. Neil Kinnock, who lost two general elections as Labour leader, was later appointed as Britain’s European commissioner.

 

For those failed politicians who don’t enjoy moules-frites, there’s always the U.N.: After losing the general election of 2010, Gordon Brown became U.N. special envoy for global education. His predecessor Tony Blair, meanwhile, was appointed Quartet envoy for the Middle East on the very same day he resigned.

 

There are several reasons why Secretary-General Keir Starmer would be bad news for the United States. First, while Starmer’s failures in domestic policy have dominated his political obituaries, he was arguably an even worse disaster on foreign policy. He attempted to give away the Chagos Islands to Mauritius — a country that never even controlled them — and pay Mauritius for the privilege. Only an intervention by the U.S. stalled the deal so that the handover couldn’t take place before Starmer was forced out.

 

The Chagos handover highlights how Starmer is, at heart, still the same human rights lawyer he was before entering politics, unable to distinguish between legal legitimacy and strategic necessity. The decolonialist, third-worldist mindset and submissiveness toward the U.N. that characterizes Keir Starmer would render NATO absolutely impotent. At a time when Americans’ trust in NATO has eroded, the worst thing that could happen would be for NATO to be led by a secretary-general who may seriously suggest the U.S. should give up control of Guam or Puerto Rico.

 

Second, there is Starmer’s stance on Israel. While he did support Israel after October 7, this support quickly waned as his party began to worry about losing Muslim and far-left voters to the Green Party. Starmer, who had started his tenure as Labour leader strong by expelling former leader Jeremy Corbyn and other extremists from the party, came to gradually embrace the fringe. Starmer and his government went on to recognize Palestinian statehood and also suspended certain arms sales to Israel, viewing the country through the lens of humanitarian, international law rather than as an ally. Though Israel is not a NATO member, it is a major non-NATO ally with cooperation ranging from counterterrorism to civil emergencies preparedness.

 

Third and related to this, Keir Starmer not only refused to back the U.S. war on Iran but also refused to let the U.S. use British bases like the joint British-American Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands to carry out attacks, though he later changed his mind and allowed limited “defensive” use.

 

Finally, and speaking of changing one’s mind, Starmer’s record in government is one of an unprecedented number of U-turns. Keir Starmer broke promises or reversed stance on everything from welfare reform to grooming gangs and digital ID. Though mostly not related to foreign policy, the constant U-turns reveal Starmer as someone who, even when backed by a massive parliamentary majority, cannot hold firm against pressure — an essential characteristic of any NATO secretary-general, especially in turbulent times like these.

 

In the short term, Andy Burnham’s problem will be to retain Starmer’s seat in the upcoming by-election. Though on paper a safe Labour seat, it is also a London seat — a poor match for Burnham, who has spent years railing against London and the London-centric government. Green Party leader Zack Polanski has announced his intention to run for the seat, and many in the local constituency Labour party are Starmer loyalists who may feel demoralized by his exit. While Labour is likely to win, even a close race would send shivers down the spines of the other 58 London Labour MPs, abruptly ending Burnham’s honeymoon.

 

Beyond that, however, Andy Burnham is all but certain to make a push for Starmer to be appointed secretary-general in 2028, if this is indeed Starmer’s goal. With the election coming up in 2029, Burnham will want to have Starmer safely stored out of his way and out of Britain, to prevent the former PM from causing any ruckus during the campaign.

 

In the past, failed British policymakers and aristocrats were routinely exiled to the country’s distant colonies, being “promoted” to positions with fancy titles that ensured they would never again set foot in London. Though the empire is long gone, Britain does still control the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to which Napoleon was exiled and where he died. As the governor of St. Helena is appointed rather than elected, this position may be a more suitable retirement gig for Keir Starmer — as long as Andy Burnham makes it clear he’s not allowed to give the island away.

Don’t Malign the U.S. Economy

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, August 11, 2026

 

The United States of America may be the greatest place for functionally illiterate people to live in all of human history.

 

An eye-popping column in the Financial Times the other day noted how people in the U.S. with very low literacy make about as much per hour as the average worker in the U.K.

 

Is this the result of brilliant public policy, carefully crafted to boost the prospects of those on the margins? No, it’s a byproduct of the vast, endlessly dynamic wealth-generating machine that is the American economy.

 

The Financial Times also compared cohorts of low-literacy workers in the U.S. and the U.K.: “The same proportion of U.S. workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almost $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are in work. Their British counterparts make the equivalent of $20 and fewer than half are employed.”

 

It continued: “Factory workers in the U.S. earn 60 per cent more than in the U.K. after adjusting for differences in living costs. Plumbers and electricians earn 90 per cent more, and retail workers earn double.”

 

While the U.K. isn’t what it used to be, it’s still a major G-7 economy — yet it has been significantly outpaced by its former colony across the Atlantic.

 

Our political debate is characterized by a mismatch between the extraordinary, world-beating economic achievement of the United States on the one hand and the determination of the left — and some elements of the right — to throw out our economic system as a rank failure on the other.

 

This is not to deny the validity of real economic discontents — especially the high cost of housing, education, and health care — but perhaps no economic system has been so vilified while so consistently delivering.

 

The case for revolutionary change relies on dishonesty and misleading claims. Enter Bernie Sanders, the patron saint of the DSA, who recently posted on X a figure showing the United States with the highest child poverty rate among a group of developed countries at 21.1 percent.

 

“We must end the outrage,” he thundered, “that in the richest country in the history of the world, more than 1 in 5 children live in poverty.”

 

The problem with the number is that it is from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and measures income relative to a country’s median rather than absolute poverty. In other words, the statistic tells us where people stand compared with others in their own country, not about material deprivation as such. As critics of the Sanders post have pointed out, if everyone in the United States — including the poor — instantly earned twice what they make now, the OECD figure would find the same amount of “poverty”; the threshold for being poor would simply rise together with the median income.

 

(The official Census Bureau figure is 14.3 percent, by the way, and has substantially declined since the late 1950s.)

 

What the OECD figure is really about is inequality, an obsession of Sanders and his ilk, but not a good indicator of economic performance.

 

In the United States, wealthy people are very wealthy, but Americans across much of the income distribution are also richer than their counterparts in Western countries.

 

With our wealth comes incredibly high living standards compared with the rest of the developed world. If the U.K. or France were made states in the U.S., they’d rank near or below West Virginia and Mississippi in terms of nominal GDP per capita. And we’ve been increasing the economic gap with peer countries — Canada, the U.K., and the EU — over roughly the last 15 years.

 

So, by all means, make particular critiques of our system and suggest improvements. All such discussions, though, should begin with recognition of what we’ve built and a commitment to preserving it, rather than the DSA approach of hoping to guillotine as a class enemy the goose that keeps laying the golden egg.

The British Public Is to Blame for the U.K.’s Dysfunction

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

Keir Starmer has fallen. Long live Andy Burnham! Or Angela Rayner or Wes Streeting, or Yvette Cooper, or whichever other poor, downtrodden sod manages to finagle the job of prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland for a few sweaty and bruising months before this interminable game of political hot potato chooses a new victim or, if interrupted by an election, lands in the lap of a different party. At this point, taking the reins of the British government is a little like becoming the drummer in Spinal Tap. You know that you’re going to be toast pretty soon; the only interesting question is how.

 

It would, I concede, be rather cathartic for me to list all the ways in which Keir Starmer was a historically terrible premier. But, as it happens, I have a different target to roast. Peruse the channels of sophisticated opinion in England today, and you will inevitably encounter some variation of the argument that the United Kingdom has of late become “ungovernable,” because its “complicated” electorate desires a set of public policies that cannot coexist. British voters, this supposition runs, want housing to become more affordable for the young and for the existing housing stock to retain its value; they want taxes to stop rising and for more money to be spent on the health service, on pensions, and on care for the elderly; they want the price of energy to go down and to achieve “net zero”; they want Britain to start inventing things again and for their island to retain its sprawling archipelago of regulations; they want to be welcoming and “diverse” and to acknowledge that the country’s infrastructure is already bulging at the seams. As a descriptive matter, this may well be true. As an excuse, however, it is thoroughly inadequate. Substantively, there is no real difference between it and the suggestion that the median voter in Britain is seven years old. Voters want everything, all at once, with no trade-offs or sacrifices to be seen? Of course they do. Who wouldn’t? But adults ought to know that this is not possible. Where are the adults in British political life?

 

I am not offering up a defense for any of the figures who have run Britain over the last two decades. Keir Starmer included, they are all craven mediocrities. Rather, I am attempting to lay the blame for that where it ultimately belongs — which is with the British public. Vote-seekers are professionally obliged to pretend that Britain has had seven prime ministers in ten years because there is something abstractly wrong with the “system” that the selection of the right leader will magically fix. I am not so obliged, which allows me to say without fear or favor that the real reason that Britain has had seven prime ministers in ten years is that the British public would rather blame its own lazy schizophrenia on the Westminster class than to look inward and acknowledge that it has routinely demanded its own decline. “Our doubts,” wrote Shakespeare, “are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.” They don’t want to hear it, but, in this instance, the doubts, fears, and treachery here are the voters’.

 

The numbers are stark. In 2008, U.S. GDP per capita was about 25 percent higher than the U.K.’s. Today, it is 40 percent higher, such that were Britain to become the 51st American state, it would be poorer than all of the existing 50 — including Mississippi. (Per capita GDP in Mississippi is $55,900; in the U.K., it is $53,200.) Since 2008, average household incomes in the U.S. have gone from about 36 percent higher than Britain’s to about 63 percent higher. Over the same period, real GDP per capita has increased by around 65 percent in the United States, and by about 3 percent in the United Kingdom; British productivity has been effectively flat; and American stocks have left their British counterparts in the dust, with the S&P 500 vastly outperforming the FTSE 100. In 2026, Britain has only a handful of innovative companies, an alarmingly limited ability to project military force, and, despite the fact that the Exchequer is on course to collect a larger share of national income in taxes than at any point in the postwar era, a raft of crumbling public services about which voters never stop complaining.

 

Given all this, one would expect to see considerable support in Britain for radical change — not simply in who is running the government but in the core presumptions that inform that government’s approach. And yet, incredibly, no such movement is afoot. “Growth” remains an alien word within British political life. Only 19 percent of Britons believe that taxes and spending should be decreased. No major political party will touch the National Health Service, and no major political figure has come out against the “triple lock” policy that guarantees that pensions will rise each year by whichever is highest: inflation, wage growth, or 2.5 percent. There has been no meaningful attempt to embrace a broad program of deregulation, even as regulation has become an increasingly significant constraint on housing construction, energy development, and infrastructure projects. The political consensus behind “net zero” has endured. Worst of all, the British do not seem to understand on a visceral level that their nation has become poor, sclerotic, and geopolitically irrelevant. Now, as ever, the smug reassurance that “at least we’re not America” obfuscates a multitude of sins.

 

Well, perhaps Britain should try being more like America for a while. It worked last time.

Ten Years After Brexit, Britain Is Better Off

By John Gustavsson

Tuesday, June 23, 2026

 

On June 23, 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. A shell-shocked David Cameron announced his resignation as prime minister the following morning. Today, ten years later, the mood in Britain is pessimistic, and more and more policymakers now voice support for rejoining. Even with the current political turmoil over Keir Starmer’s exit, on this anniversary, I would like to make two bold claims: Brexit has paid off — and Britain will never rejoin the EU.

 

At its core, Brexit gave Britain back sovereignty that it had ceded to Brussels. But ten years on, what neither supporters nor opponents of Brexit care to admit is how little Brexit has really changed. Britain has not become the “Singapore-On-Thames,”  and the sunlit uplands promised by Brexit proponents turned out to be cloudy.

 

At the same time, trade with both the EU and the rest of the world is tugging along just fine, very much contrary to predictions at the time. Britain was never forced to go to the “back of the queue” as Barack Obama famously threatened; trade deals were instead rolled over smoothly with all but three countries with which the EU had previous agreements. There have also been new trade deals, but the overall makeup of destination countries of British exports and imports have barely budged. British growth is slow, but no slower than other major European economies.

 

But while there are a great number of examples of how Britain could and should have made better use of its new sovereignty, this should not deflect from the very real gains.

 

The first such gain took place during the Covid pandemic. Britain’s vaccine rollout was the envy of the world, with Brits getting shots while the EU was still bickering internally on how to distribute the limited supply of vaccines fairly between the member states. Even EU-friendly voices conceded that Brexit had given Britain a degree of flexibility no member state had. Had Britain been part of the EU, thousands more Brits would have surely died.

 

While London remains enthralled by environmentalism to much the same degree as Brussels, Brexit enabled reform of agricultural subsidies. Whereas the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU pays farmers based not chiefly on outcomes but on land ownership, Britain’s replacement has a stronger emphasis on outcomes, and it also has the state take on a greater share of the costs of the climate transition.

 

One of the greatest Brexit benefits is only now beginning to be realized: Thanks to Brexit, Britain is free to pursue its own AI strategy. While Britain shares the EU’s tendency to indulge in overregulation of AI, London has wisely refused to follow Brussels’s lead. While EU leaders are bragging about implementing the first AI regulatory framework, Britain is moving more cautiously, rejecting the EU’s top-down, preemptive regulation approach for a more business-friendly direction with real input from the private sector and legislation on a case-by-case basis.

 

Britain is also taking an explicitly pro-development position on data centers, which have been designated as critical national infrastructure. Criticism of data centers, so prevalent both in the U.S. and the EU, has been effectively shut down in Britain. While high energy prices will stifle AI’s potential in Britain, its relatively lighter regulatory touch at least gives the industry a fighting chance.

 

This is not limited to AI, but also true for the service sector more broadly: While trade in goods has fallen since Brexit, this has been compensated for by a boom in services. This is particularly true in the realm of financial services; despite warnings to the contrary, London remains the undisputed seat of European banking and finance post-Brexit.

 

Yet overall, Brexit has most certainly fallen short of voters’ expectations (not least on immigration). But does that mean Britain is destined to rejoin? Not at all. Britain is staying out.

 

This is not mainly because doing so would mean losing the above-mentioned Brexit benefits. Rather, it is because on Brexit, there is truly no going back: As an EU member, Britain enjoyed exceptionally favorable membership terms, including a substantial rebate on its annual membership fee courtesy of Margaret Thatcher. Britain also had opt-outs on matters including the border checkpoint–free Schengen area and the euro.

 

Polling has for years indicated that at least a strong plurality of British voters would like to rejoin. A poll from earlier this month showed 55 percent support for rejoining. Yet when asked whether they would support rejoining the EU if it meant accepting the same membership terms as other countries, that same poll indicated only 35 percent of Brits would rejoin.

 

Is there then no chance that the EU could offer the same terms, to once again enjoy the pleasure of Britain’s company? Definitely not. It is an open secret in Brussels that Britain is not exactly missed. Brexit created a power vacuum that was quickly filled by the other major European countries, and while they would not stop Britain from rejoining on equal terms, they would not bend over backward since British reentry would mean them losing political influence. This is also the view held by the public across the largest EU countries — France, Germany, Italy, and Spain — where a poll last year indicated only a third of voters would support letting Britain back in with the opt-outs it enjoyed (and the poll didn’t even ask about the rebate!).

 

During its almost half a century as a member, Britain was a persistent thorn in the side of Eurofederalists, frequently joining with smaller countries like the Nordics to block or slow political centralization. With the British gone, the French and Germans are able to run the show in a way they never could before.

 

The final reason why rejoining is a nonstarter is practical: Brexit was a messy process that took down two prime ministers. Rejoining would be at least as messy. Whoever would be prime minister at the time would not be asked about anything else, and no matter what he or she wanted to talk about, journalists would bring the discussion back to the reentry process: How are negotiations going? Are we getting any opt-outs? How are we going to convince this or that country to let us back in (like NATO, the EU requires unanimity to admit new members)?

 

Theresa May, who succeeded David Cameron, is today only remembered for her ultimately unsuccessful negotiations concerning Britain’s withdrawal from the EU after the Brexit vote. She accomplished little else as PM due to Brexit occupying everyone’s attention and the situation demanding her to spend all her political capital on passing an exit deal (in vain, as it would turn out — a revised deal was finally agreed to under her successor, Boris Johnson). Even pro-European British policymakers will look at what she went through and shudder at the thought of the same thing happening to them.

 

On the ten-year anniversary of the Brexit vote, many Brits may be tempted to look back at Brussels with the wistful glance of Lot’s wife. Yet, a decade after taking back control, Brits should also remember what they’ve gained: Unlike ten years ago, the buck now stops only at 10 Downing Street. While Britain has a lot of work to do, it has no reason to regret reclaiming its independence.

Starmer to Step Down

By Andrew Stuttaford

Monday, June 22, 2026

 

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is to step down in September. When an authoritarian loses authority within his own party, it is time to go, and so Starmer is going. To resign as prime minister at a time when his or her party commands a large parliamentary majority (if little respect in the country) is particularly humiliating.

 

The conventional wisdom is that Starmer failed by letting things drift. If only. He failed by presiding over a government that has been all too active, with consequences that are making Britain worse off politically, economically, and as a society. The voters noticed, to which Starmer has mainly responded by trying, via censorship initiatives, to shut them up. However, his MPs were starting to think about the next election, even though it does not need to take place until 2029. Eyeing Labour’s dismal polling, they were getting too restless to be ignored.

 

Candidates to replace Starmer were beginning to emerge. When the most dangerous among them, the seemingly much more personable (low bar) Andy Burnham, an ex-MP turned mayor of Greater Manchester, was reelected to parliament in a special election last week, the end was nigh. Dull but not a dullard, Starmer has now tried to cling to some dignity by avoiding a fight he was likely to lose.

 

Will Burnham be Starmer’s successor? Probably. If he does, will he call a snap general election to capitalize both on any political honeymoon and the continuing divisions on the British right? Possibly. The fact that the U.K. may well be headed toward a financial crisis could also be a good reason to get an election in first.

 

What sort of prime minister will Burnham be? He’s widely thought of as a political chameleon, but I’d guess that he will take Labour somewhat further to the left (which would please many of its MPs) while trying to camouflage the awfulness of its policies with a patina of managerialism — and with salesmanship smoother than anything Starmer could achieve.

 

The pound fell on the news of Starmer’s fall (and Burnham’s likely rise). Fair enough.

The U.K.’s Horrific Rape Gangs

National Review Online

Friday, June 19, 2026

 

Not long ago, mentioning England’s grooming gangs — more accurately described as “child rape gangs” — was considered a reprehensible racist “dog whistle.” In fact, simply noticing the demographics of most of the perpetrators and most of the victims risked running afoul of hate speech laws: Derek Heggie was sent behind bars for “grossly offensive” comments on YouTube, such as stating that “young white girls are being raped by these grooming gangs that worship the Prophet Muhammad.” But after Elon Musk amplified the discussion on X in 2025 and resurfaced uncomfortable statistics, the frustrated British public began demanding the truth.

 

Finally, the survivors and whistleblowers have been provided the platform and appropriate privacy protections to describe their experiences. And you can be forgiven for being too horrified by the details to listen for more than just a few minutes.

 

The Rape Gang Inquiry Report, published on Tuesday and exceeding 200 pages, was supported by crowdsourced funding; it lacked certain statutory powers because it was not a government inquiry, although it was led by Member of Parliament and Restore Britain party leader Rupert Lowe. The investigators had limited powers, such as the inability to compel witnesses or require the sort of document production that could corroborate some of the most heinous claims. Viewed with those limitations in mind, the independent report is a damning collection of victim testimonies that vividly portray the sexual terrorism that occurred nationwide for decades.

 

The girls, sometimes as young as eleven, told of being raped daily, drugged, beaten, burned, racially abused, trafficked throughout the country, forced to convert to Islam, and coerced into Islamic marriages. In some cases, the sexual abuse was filmed and distributed, then used as blackmail against the children (and, occasionally, their families too). The girls contracted a range of sexually transmitted diseases, while some experienced multiple pregnancies that ended by miscarriage, abortion, or live birth. But hospital visits were necessary for more than pregnancy appointments: A twelve-year-old was raped and then penetrated with a whiskey bottle that shattered inside her, but she was discharged after treatment without ever being asked how she had incurred the injury.

 

The girls were also subjected to harassment, stalking, and intimidation. One victim was apparently made an accessory to homicide when she was instructed to clean the knives from a scene where two fatal stabbings had occurred. Several girls and young women attempted to escape a gang’s territory by relocating in the country — but they were found and forced back into what is essentially sexual slavery, although they first watched the gangsters destroy their new homes. The abused children and women recounted lengthy struggles with substance misuse and self-harm, while some attempted suicide.

 

These atrocities become more alarming and enraging upon realizing that the British government was not clueless. Virtually every British institution — the police, the judiciary, the social-care services, the health-care system, the schools, and taxi-licensing bodies — had been made aware of the gangs, yet failed to appropriately intervene. The victims recall instances where the authorities entirely ignored their credible claims and corroborating evidence or responded by perfunctorily issuing mild warnings to perpetrators. In some cases, the police allegedly found the girls in compromising situations with pimps in homes or cars but did not even bother to question the men.

 

Even worse, it appears that some government employees actively facilitated or encouraged the abuse. A victim recalled an occasion when a police officer returned her to the children’s home where she resided, and he told the loitering gangsters to “have fun with her.” When a social worker finally initiated a discussion with a 14-year-old about her ongoing sexual exploitation, that person raised the possibility that she audition for a television show that was looking for an actress to play a child victim of sexual abuse. The report offers a succinct and scathing assessment: “The rape gangs did not operate in the shadows, but with the active or passive consent of the British state. The betrayal was total.”

 

But why were the exploited children ignored, disbelieved, and abandoned by the sprawling surveillance state that is so quick to punish benign conduct like carrying a teeny toy replica sword? The answer is that Britain has succumbed to a dangerous ideology that — in the words of the report — emphasizes “diversity, inclusion, and non-judgementalism as supreme virtues.” Pursuing justice for the girls would have revealed uncomfortable demographic trends that challenge the state-sponsored proclamations that celebrate diversity, equity, anti-racism, and large-scale immigration as intrinsic goods. In particular, a thorough law-enforcement response would have made plain the devastating figures showing vast overrepresentation of Pakistanis and Muslims as perpetrators, while further illustrating that white girls tended to be their targets. Despite the efforts to sanitize the data, South Asian men are significantly overrepresented; 62 percent of convicted offenders in group-based child sexual exploitation in Rotherham were recorded as having a Pakistani background, despite amounting to just about 4 percent of the local population.

 

The report recites a previous estimate that there have been 250,000 victims of the rape gangs in Britain, but it underscores that this figure is a “bare minimum.” However, this number was calculated by extrapolating from previous reports focused on particular localities and therefore could be either much too high or low. Still, it is worth acknowledging that this estimate attempts to capture the number of victims — not the number of perpetrators or the number of offenses committed. Several survivors told the inquiry team that they believe they were raped by “hundreds” of South Asian men, while the abuse occurred several times a week or even daily.

 

Unfortunately, it is unlikely that we will ever uncover the exact number of victims and identify every offender, yet a great evil has occurred if even one single girl endured just an hour under the control of the gangsters. The physical, emotional, and psychological damage can never be undone, but hopefully the responsible parties — including government actors who failed to intervene — can be appropriately called out and punished. But first, we must first accept the report’s sober conclusion: “Until the country rejects the fear of being called ‘racist’ and restores the courage to name uncomfortable truths, the conditions that allowed these networks to thrive will remain.”

Yes, It’s Terrorism

By Seth Mandel

Monday, June 15, 2026

 

Americans should pay close attention to an ongoing court battle in Britain. No matter which way the ruling ultimately goes, the case has managed to reveal the fundamental nature of the networks of post-October 7 anti-Zionist activism.

 

The case is that of Palestine Action, which I’ve written about previously and which is one of many identical groups all over the West.

 

In 2022, Palestine Action stormed into a factory owned by French defense manufacturer Thales because of the group’s belief that Thales supplied the Israeli military. The group vandalized equipment and threw a smoke bomb at people as they were being evacuated, and its members set off pyrotechnics that caused 1 million pounds of damage.

 

In 2024, in one of the group’s two break-ins, activists drove a truck into an Elbit Systems factory, smashed up equipment, and broke a policewoman’s spine with a sledgehammer while her back was turned. Four of the culprits were recently jailed after two trials: The jury in the first trial found them not guilty after a successful campaign of jury interference on the part of supporters of Palestine Action. A second, legitimate trial was then held, and they were found guilty on lesser charges.

 

Last year, members of the group broke into a Royal Air Force base and attempted to sabotage planes.

 

While this is only a partial list of the group’s exploits, it helps explain why last year, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper proscribed Palestine Action as a terrorist group, making membership of it or aiding and abetting its actions a crime. Parliament then ratified the order. A higher court overruled the move, arguing that not enough of Palestine Action’s work counts as terrorism to outlaw the entire group.

 

Now an appeals court has reversed the earlier appeal, allowing the ban to stand. The court’s reasoning is important.

 

A group of judges led by Chief Justice Baroness Carr explained that the home secretary has the power to make such designations and that, therefore, the proscription of Palestine Action was legal. She also said it would be “a fundamental mistake to overlook the fact that Palestine Action overtly promotes unlawful violence amounting to terrorism. It is not — as claimed — a direct action civil disobedience protest group like the suffragettes, operating transparently in the open.”

 

That mention of the suffragettes is a reference to the argument made at the first Palestine Action trial over the Elbit Systems attack. The perpetrators’ attorney claimed that the actions of his clients shouldn’t be punished because they believed their anti-Semitic violent romps were equivalent to demonstrations by rights activists like the suffragettes. In any normal criminal justice system this would be laughed out of court, but the jury was convinced by this and the corresponding campaign by activists claiming that ideological intent could render otherwise criminal activity permissible.

 

It was a deeply humiliating moment for the British justice system, which was revealed to be hanging by a thread. It also proved the wisdom of Cooper’s move the following year to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organization: It met the criteria, and the justice system had become too corrupted by ideology to maintain the equality of Jews before the law, thereby leaving the terrorism designation not only fitting and accurate but the only means by which to effectively keep Britain’s democracy from further backsliding through constant manipulation by Hamas supporters.

 

Chief Justice Carr continued: Palestine Action “is a covert organization which operates with secret cells to avoid the detection and prosecution of those using violence to destroy property and cause injury.”

 

In other words, when you look at what Palestine Action does, it’s clear to impartial officials that it is a group of terror cells.

 

Palestine Action was one of three groups put on the terrorism list the same day last year. The other two were Maniacs Murder Cult and Russian Imperial Movement. There was no outcry for these white supremacist groups, though their belief systems are comparable to Palestine Action’s.

 

Last week, I wrote about a case here on U.S. soil with similar implications. The Justice Department announced federal conspiracy charges against a Michigan-based pro-Hamas ring for its members’ own campaign of harassment, property damage, and terroristic threats. In the course of the investigation that led to the charges, it became clear to law enforcement that the group had nothing to do with “protesting.” It was, they alleged, simply a ring of violent maniacs who fully understood the illegality of their actions.

 

The Palestine Action ruling will still be appealed to the UK Supreme Court. But the court cannot change the facts as the judges laid them out above. And by trying to equate terrorism with free speech and civil protest, the West’s various Hamasnik groups and their defenders continue to undermine both.